"I saved the man, didn't I?"
"By substituting new gods for theirs. We want to free them, Baiel."
"Is there any other way to do it?"
"By teaching them the truth. By destroying their burden of gods and superstitions—not by creating more."
This amused him and he laughed. I thought his reaction was odd, but I still misinterpreted it.
For the next two months I became more and more involved in helping the tribe find its way toward civilization. We could not impose anything remotely like our Earth culture. The answer to the problem, without the technique for reaching the solution, would be meaningless. But in small things, like the brief spring thaws that slowly ate away their planet-capping glacier, we could erode and destroy their shell of savagery.
Because of its application to my own situation with Dayhan, the first teaching I undertook was cleanliness. On the Earth it is an old joke that, when we build, we plan the bathing facilities first; our space ships are notably awkward to maneuver because we include so many elaborate baths. To us, filth equates with savagery. Cleanliness was a concept which the tribe quickly adopted and understood, because the reward was both visible and immediate.
We erected stone culverts above the fire, melting chunks of ice and channeling the warm water into a stone pool built inside the cave. Following the example set by the expedition, the tribe shortly took to daily bathing as a matter of course. We taught them to scrape the filth from their skins, to comb the lice out of their hair.
I was amazed—and enormously pleased—with the physical change a bath brought in Dayhan. Her stringy hair took on a golden luster. Her dirty skin softened and color came slowly into her yellow cheeks. The running sores dried, caked, and disappeared. Instinctively she came to be aware of her potential loveliness. She began to experiment with braiding her hair in various ways over her slanting skull. Once I found her trying sprigs of greenery in the knot and studying the effect in her reflection in the bathing pool.
The cave was always warm, particularly when the wind and snow howled through the village; but it was uncomfortably crowded. Because the fire was built at the mouth of the cave, the oxygen inside was inadequate. We never slept through a night without feeling a nagging nausea from the foul air we breathed.